Too Much Firefox in the News

Again, the Open-Source world is trying so very hard to compete with itself and, in some cases, its own backers.

No-one with half a brain really thinks that all this programming time is free, as we all need day jobs from which to shirk off in order to work on OSS projects -- unless our company is throwing its good-will tax write-off money into that fickle wind of funding Open Source Development, of course, in which case you may need to plan for the eventual drying-up of said funding or the moment when the mob grows weary/bored/whatever (the Caldera effect -- except this mob will not be upset if you ignore them back).

Given the precarious, and in some cases oblivious, attitude that OSS as a mob has toward the business that indirectly feeds it in our obscenely capitalist society, it's remarkable that business doesn't lay its golden foot down more and make its wishes even more known. After all, business isn't particularly overtly concerned with much beyond its bottom line; we've selectively bred out anything less focused.

Maybe I'm just not as tolerant as the average business, but it sould surprise me when considering the goal of business..

I'm getting increasingly sick of the mozilla people - all hail them for the kind and benvolent gods they must truly be, etc - for shooting themselves in the left foot to promote their right foot. What kind of growing business actively works to cut itself out of the picture? It's mind-numblingly stupid, especially so for people who're so otherwise gifted.

Doubly so disappointing is the fact that the bloated piece of software that is Mozilla may soon finally ship with all the features of its older brother Netscape, and may finally be a bona fide Upgrade to the older software (for it can only be an upgrade if it has new stuff and omits no non-buggy stuff).

Apparently having a project nearing a point where it's indistinguishable from 'working' (for some definitions of 'working') is not an interesting goal for the Chrome-and-Theming mozilla crowd. They want to now cut the one bloated app into two - no, three bloated apps, maybe more - and have you grab all of these seprately to install.

Do they understand that we've worked with the Open Source Community before, and really don't trust any open source product for compatibility unless every part of that product is released from the same build process?

It almost seems that Compatibility is considered Gauche in the Open Source world, although Open Source people aren't as bad as Free Software People - thus the term "this week's X" in the sense of "unless you grab this week's GNUN X package, don't expect it to be compatible with Y" - and we're largely becoming less and less willing to try this stuff without some assurance that it's not going to be a waste of time. That's what we get in Mozilla that we don't get in Firefox and Thunderbird (aka Dog and Pony): all but guaranteed compatibility. It's the same app, released the same moment, and it can't not have the same APIs.

Yes, it's free-as-in-beer, and the code is free-as-in-speech, and I therefore have no right to freely (as in speech, ha!) criticise it for anything less than the perfectly formed piece of lovingly crafted bug-free software it can only be (unless I in the same breath deliver my fixes in diff-u format), but may I suggest that even free-as-in-beer software indeed isn't free? The time we take to purse up the prerequisites to install in lock-step with each week's revision of the software sure is worthy of consideration, although I'm sure I'm a heathen for suggesting so. Yes, Open Source projects only compete Good-Naturedly, but when an engineer is too busy futzing with a re-working of his bug for the other browser or mailer instead of having time to get to the next one, or when a testor runs out of lunch break at IBM, or when the long-hair crunchies are buying up ads for a minority component instead of the product, you must suspect that the effort being put forth is less than optimal.

It's the generally incompatible nature of open software - or should I say general lack of anything resembling testing and the nature of open-source projects to naturally drift away from each other in terms of compatibility - that is surely shooting this and other projects in the foot. Try not to disagree until you've tried upgrading GAIM while leaving GTK at 2.0 so you can use a particular app for its feature which was dropped subsequently (like Roaming on Netscape). We must upgrade everything at once to ensure compatibility. While I itch to use glorious free software and show it off as the champion for everything good that it surely is, I'm continually defeated by very difficult, intermittent bugs that have been known about for years but still not fixed simply because the engineers in question were too busy working on some new theming support, some new gimmick, or working to support yet another pluggable extension module rather than fixing some crash. Meanwhile, I have 4 JS [alerts] whenever I block a pop-up.

So, I ask you: When I hear the Mozilla Foundation touting their experimental, younger, probably buggier pair of bloated software fanboy apps over the integrated, better tested, more respected piece of bloated software, why should I agree? Why should tell my friends to go download Thunderbird 0.9999b2rc5.3 and Phoenix Firebird FireFox 1.0.1.20050201.1859a when even they just want one download, one install, one integrated app that does most of their net communications needs and will most likely work with itself? What's the added value in splitting that into two apps which are independently released and developed, adn therefore not 100% guaranteed to not have an incompatibility problem beyond today's non-functioning maito: link?

I hate it when people make stupid decisions. I hate to see them advertising yet another stupid decision. I tire of them and their fanboys trumpeting lunacy from the heavens as if they don't realize it's their own eardrums and business they're splitting. And if I can see a problem, me, then these guys are seriously messing up.